The Virus – and Other Moral Hazards, by Hadley Arkes

By Hadley Arkes, The Catholic Thing, March 24, 2020

Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Amherst College and the Founder/Director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law. Volume II of his audio lectures from The Modern Scholar, First Principles and Natural Law is now available for download.

I count myself as one of those votaries, working in the vineyard of natural law, who does not find his work among “theories.”  I am drawn, with others of my club, to those precepts of “common sense” that ordinary people routinely do grasp in order to get on with the business of life – the things they need to know before they are capable of trafficking in theories.  Before anyone engages in banter with David Hume about the meaning of “causation,” he knows – even without realizing that he knows – his own active powers to cause his own acts to happen.

British philosopher John Finnis would point up in this vein the many ways in which people weave into their acts every day an anchoring premise about the goodness of preserving human life.  In Finnis’s examples, we look both ways from the curb before we cross the street; we hold drives to rescue people from famine in distant countries. We have not yet exactly constituted a hospital or emergency service built on the premise that the main mission in dealing with an injured person is to dispatch him to his death more quickly in order to relieve his family of hard decisions. With an assumption they never think to question, these services take their mission as the saving of lives.  ….

Read more here:  https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2020/03/24/the-virus-and-other-moral-hazards/